Archive: Feb 2009

This decision was inevitable. For an Obama administration that professes to favor transparency in governance, lifting the ban on media images of soldiers’ coffins returning to Dover Air Force Base from Iraq and Afghanistan was a no-brainer. But even for the Bush administration, the ban was the most apparent example of two deeply conflicted modes of media management: secrecy at home and guided exposure abroad.

Of course, like many of the media management tactics that administration employed, the policy itself pre-dates George W. Bush’s arrival in D.C. The ban was put into place during his father’s tenure in the White House, but was never fully enforced until the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. For journalists already accustomed to the notoriously secretive ways of the second Bush administration, it was no surprise that they would deny access to such politically powerful images. Many of Bush’s advisors, including Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, felt strongly that images of soldiers’ coffins had turned public opinion against the Vietnam War and hoped to avoid a similar result in the current conflicts. Less than a year into Bush’s first term and already known for their ability to shape media storylines with a vice-like grip on information (starkly contrasting the leaky Clinton White House), the administration officials surprised no one by restricting access.

Nonetheless, from the Pentagon’s perspective, the increased enforcement of the ban on such images marked a reversal of a larger trend. I have written elsewhere about the history of media-military relations, but, in short, military officials felt that journalists had far too much free reign in the conflicts of Vietnam and, much more recently, Somalia. Such independence, they believed, had led to largely negative coverage. In an impulsive leap to the other extreme, the Pentagon stowed journalists in pressrooms in Kuwait during the first Gulf War – an arrangement reporters and media outlets bitterly decried. For the 2003 invasion of Iraq (and to a limited extent in Afghanistan), the Pentagon introduced its controversial media embedding program, allowing journalists to attach themselves to units.

Importantly, this strategy was the exact opposite of their domestic media strategy. Rather than block media access altogether, they gave the press in-depth access to soldiers and military units, while at the same time, successfully steering them away from covering the consequences of the invasion for the civilian population. Though the embedding program was as successful a media management tactic as the secrecy in D.C., it did not breed the same sort of resentment in journalists as it provided them with fascinating (albeit one-sided) coverage. For this reason, it was the better strategy: shape the coverage, but leave them happy.

In some ways, we should question why the Bush administration didn’t reform the soldier coffin ban themselves, employing the lessons of their international media strategy with the domestic press. Rather than blocking images (which only generated more interest from the press), why didn’t the administration encourage the Pentagon to arrange sessions with vetted pro-invasion military families who would speak of the importance of the sacrifice their son or daughter made? Perhaps, they feel the image of dead Americans on U.S. soil would simply unpalatable to the American public. Returning to the current administration, the question for the future will be whether they are ushering in a legitimate age of transparency and broader media access, or if they’ve simply learned a lesson about savvy media management from their predecessors.

KPFA in Berkely has a wonderful radio show called Against the Grain.   Tuesday’s show had an interview by the host C.S. Soong with William Irvine, a philosophy professor at Wayne State University.  The talk fouced on Irvine’s new book “A Giude to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy.”  The book focuses on the anicent Greek/Roman philosophy of Stoicism.  In the interview, Irvine notes that the goal of the Stoics was “tranquility” or the moderation of passions and desires which often lead us towards emotional higs and lows.  He claims the stoics did this through reasoning.  If you want a brand new car that you don’t need, the Stoics prescribe that you think about your current car being stolen and how that loss would make you feel.  That in turn would make you appreciate your existing car more.

My policy class is looking at metaphors and symbols in politics and how they are used to frame debate about issues.  A growing consensus in emerging on our biological predispositions to become vulnerable to frames.  Matt Bai has a good New York Times Magazine article that describes the Democratic party’s love affair with George Lakoff and his theories of framing.  But listeinging to Irvine’s description of the stoics makes me think about how much we’ve allowed ourselves to succumb to emotion and desire in political discourse.  The Greek conception of man (people) was that they were half animal and half god.  The animal was the impulsive, irrational side and the god was the reasoned, logical side. I contend that our politics have drifted towards appealing to our “animal side.”  See Frontline’s great documentary The Persuaders for an example of emotional appeals.

Of course politicians have always appealed to lower instincts in making claims to power.  But do we have a responsibility to create a “push back” from the “god side.”

What are the consequences of policies that are sold to us using strong emotional appeals?  Should we as a society demand that our citizens work to cultivate virtues like tranquility and reason?  Or has the train left the station… message makers have become much too sophisticated at pushing our emotional buttons that reason’s not making a comeback, and it hasn’t been here for years  (apologies to L.L. Cool J).

I’m giving a talk tomorrow to our Pyschology Department’s brown bag series entitled “You Call This Service? The Effect of Project Type on Deficiency Paradigms in a Service Learning Project.”  The main theme of this talk is that unreflective service learning programs that emphasize altruistic service learning where the pedagogical emphasis is on “service” has deleterious effects for both the subject and object of service learning.  From my article (currently under review The Journal of Political Science Education):

the programmatic emphasis with altruism focused service programs is on the community being served as “in need” rather than as a community with a pre-existing stock of assets (Kretzman and McKnight 1993). This deficiency paradigm (McKnight 1996) leads to a focus on what Eby (1998) calls McService or Service in a Box – a perspective on service that ignores the specific context in which the service takes place and thereby reinforces a paradigm of advantage and dependence.

Service learning is a very powerful and effective pedagogy. A number of studies find that the approach enhances students’ understanding of links between theory and practice, their problem-solving and critical thinking and their empathy towards social problems. But how do we keep our students and our institutions from developing a “do gooder” syndrome where they view their role as “saving” communities?

In the study I discuss tomorrow, I present very preliminary research that suggests that students gain a more complex relationship of low-income communities when service learning programs are designed to promote collaborative work rather than traditional forms of voluntarism. Altruism and giving of one’s time are important elements of a strong civic culture. However, my fear is that we train a generation of students who want to work for rather than with people in low income communities.

Theda Skocpol has a great critique of the change in civic participation from locally-based associations to national “professional advocacy” organizations that limit the range of voices in public discourse. I’m curious to hear about other’s experieince with service learning. Do students work collaboratively with communities or work for communities? Do the projects they engage in emphasize the community as deficient or as asset filled?

Although I’m not a sociologist, I was lucky enough get a Ph.D. from one of the few public policy programs (University of Colorado – Boulder) in the U.S. that wasn’t simply economics by another name and actually took sociology seriously. One of the key “lightbulb” moments in my life was being assigned C Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination.

As an intrepid young graduate student, I had no idea that I was reading a sociologist or that Mills’ was out of favor when I came across his text. He shook me by forcing me to realize that the times in which I lived were mediated through a structure, that structures have changed throughout human history, and that people life chances are heavily influenced by that structure. More importantly, he challenged me as a would be social scientist to make this truth explicit to others.

I think of Mills’ as I teach my courses at California Lutheran University in the midst of what might be a broad, expansive paradigm shift in how we organize ourselves politically and economically. I am struck by how difficult it is for people to recognize that the structure they find themselves is not how it has always been. I’m curious as to how others are talking about the global financial crisis. Are they addressing it as a temporary blip in an otherwise sound structural system? Or are they addressing the possibility of a shift and speculating as to what that shift might look like?

Andrew DelBanco has a thought provoking article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the possible renewal of the academic in public discourse as a result of the Obama election.  He summarizes the arguments Richard Hofstadter lays out in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life to explain why Americans periodically reject “eggheads” in public discourse.  But Just when you think he’s going to go into the traditional paean to the value of the academic, he doesn’t go out like that!

Rather than telling ourselves a back-and-forth tale of virtue versus vigilantism, academics concerned with the life of the mind generally, and the academic humanities in particular, might be better served by looking inward and asking what we can do to earn public trust.

Word!

We as academics need to engage in a broader discussion about how we should engage in public life before we proclaim our role as a birthright.  There is nothing wrong with a society that is reflexively mis-trusting of anyone making truth claims.  DelBanco rightly points out the inherent hypocrisy in much of the academy:

Academics certainly talk a lot about social justice, but how credible are we when, for instance, our wealthiest and most prestigious universities admit such a minuscule percentage of students (often fewer than 10 percent) from low-income families?

Our political culture is founded on a healthy skepticism of authority.  Rather than resist this role for the public or see ourselves as “society’s teachers,” we should embrace it as a challenge.

I hope and demand for my students that they see me as the authority figure in the classroom with skepticism and mis-trust.  They should be asking themselves “what am I getting out of this?”  I don’t think my jog is to challenge this question, but rather I think my job is to broaden out what our students mean by the question.  I want my students to reconsider the “what,” “I,” “getting,” and “this” part of that question.

I am particularly fond of this part of DelBanco’s article where he recounts a former student’s assessment of what he was taught in DelBanco’s courses:

“What you say about preparation for modern life and citizenship and all that is fine, but you miss the main point.” With some trepidation I asked what he meant. “What the core really taught me,” he replied, “is how to enjoy life.”

I think my public role is to help develop thinking, feeling human beings, and to be developed by the experience at the same time. I’m not sure that it happening all the time, but that’s the goal.

Good magazine has a useful illustration of the world’s most frequently used subway systems (seen here in miniature).  While the illustration doesn’t tell us something we don’t already know — that other countries use mass transit at greater rates than we do, it does illustrate the degree of difference.  I for one was surprised to learn how much more the Mexico City and Moscow subway systems were utilized than their counterparts in Boston and Chicago.  It does help contextualize our energy consumption patterns.

HT: Planetizen

Here in California, we’ve seemingly survived another “meltdown” over the state budget.  What that means is that we get a temporary reprieve until the next budget cycle where the “crisis” will resume.  What’s unique about California is that we repeat this budget dance every year with a new batch of dancers.

In 1996, California voters passed Proposition 140, a measure that restricted terms of service in the State Assembly to six years and service in the state senate to eight years.  The measure was crafted in large part by Republicans seeking to weaken the power of the powerful, charismatic then Assembly Speaker Willie Brown.  But the measure also captured the imagination of California voters.  The lore of the citizen legislator has been with us since the founding.  it harkens back to the story of Cincinattus who was summoned to leave his plow and help Rome defeat the Aequians.  Once Rome’s foes had been vanquished, he returned to the plow.

In California, it is fashionable to beat up on the term limits idea.  Indeed it has led to less experienced members, weaker committee structures, a “permanent campaign” mode and more lobbying influence, among other things.   This led California voters to approve a reform of legislative term limits in 2008 (Proposition 93) that limited members to 12 total years of service in the California legislature.

Despite term limits many problems, I’m concerned that we in California focus so much on rules because we don’t want to address the deeper issue of our state political culture.  We can tinker all we want with the rules of the game in Sacramento, but the underlying problem is a belief that “they” in Sacramento are corrupt and that California’s renewal is contingent on throwing this particular set of “bums” out.  Californians need to begin “owning” problems rather than passing them off as the result of politicians who are either “in the pocket of lobbyists” or “hate poor people.”  My political scientist brethren might argue that partisan conflict is an inevitable and healthy part of a democratic system.  But underlying that healthy conflict must be a fundamental sense of efficacy and investment in the system.  The perception that the California citizen is somehow detached from the work of government is more corrosive than any term limit or proposition.

The “citizen legislator” as a concept can work if the citizens see themselves as full members of the state rather than as victims of “corrupt politicians.”  Now back to my plow.

One of the nice things about teaching at a Lutheran college is the opportunity to have a meaningful dialogue between faith and reason.  This afternoon, I have the privilege of giving a response to a talk given by one of my esteemed colleagues, the Reverend Kapp Johnson, a faculty member of California Lutheran University’s schools of Business and Religion.  His talk will explore Martin Luther’s conception of freedom.  Since I am a blogger, I must blog about it, so blog I will.

Rev. Johnson seeks to make a distinction between our modern conception of freedom and the Christian view of liberty as expressed by Martin Luther. He uses a passage from Robert Bellah’s classic Habits of the Heart to highlight the problem with modernity’s conception of liberty:

Within modern individualism, the self becomes the central, if not the only reality.  Moral discussions become detached from any social or cultural foundations which could give them broader relevance.  The self and its feelings become the only moral criteria.

Many have developed this communitarian critique of modernity.  All sociology graduate students (and lucky Political Science grade students) get their healthy dose of Durkheim and his notion of anomie.  An individual based conception of freedom inevitably leads to a society with competing conceptions of justice and the good life which creates an intellectual and spiritual morass.

I thank the Rev. Johnson for introducing me to a very interesting set of propositions Martin Luther makes in a 1520 essay called The Freedom of a Christian.  In this essay, he sets out a pair of contradictory premises:

A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.

and:

A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.

Rev. Johnson interprets Luther (I think correctly) to mean that freedom is not so much an external phenomenon but rather a result of one’s inner spiritual nature.  Freedom for Luther is submission to Christ through faith.  This freedom allows for a  “joyous exchange” of the “sinner’s “sins, death, and damnation” for Christ’s “grace, life and salvation.”  This freedom then allows the believer to become a “dutiful servant” which, to quote Rev. Johnson from his prepared remarks “thrusts the Christian back into human life.”

Luther argues that obedience to god frees us from the mine field of our impulses and desires and focuses us directly on “the approal of God.”  Our engagement with the world, is then not motivated by any instrumental ends (i.e. getting to heaven) but rather results from the “freedom” found in faith:

The works themselves do no justify [the Christian] before God, but [the Christian] does the works out of spontaneous love in obedience to God and considers nothing except the approval of God, whom he would most scrupulously obey in all things.

Coming from the perspective of a social scientist, I have a few discussion points that I plan on bringing up later today:

1) I’d be wary of setting up a strawman.  If the distinction is between Christain faith and complete nihlism, then the playing field is tilted towards the former.  If the distinction is between Christain faith and non-Christain faith, then the terrain is more level.

2) Rev. Johnson makes an elegant case for one variety of what Isaiah Berlin refered to in a famous essay Two Concepts of Liberty as “positive freedom” or freedom to fullly realize one’s self.  However in Berlin’s essay, he ultimately comes down on the side of negative liberty, or freedom from state interference, as the best means of organizing a society because humankind cannot arrive at a consensus over which form of positive freedom to institute.

3)  The hallmark of post-modernity is a levelling of the distinction between sacred and profane.  Durkheim argues that what holds society together in the modern world is a shared agreement on the primacy of the individual and an agreement on rules to preserve its autonomy(rationality).  One could argue that system was not bad and that the problem is the re-emergence of religion and multiculturalism to challenge modernity’s conception of freedom.  See my post about the distinction beteween the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights and the Islamic Declaration of Human Rights.

4) Even if I granted that Luther’s view of Christian freedom was preferable to an individualist/modernity based view of freedom, on what basis could we claim that it’s preferable to any other religiously grounded freedom claim.  Why isn’t Siddhartha’s call to “renounce the self” any more or less valid than the Christian claim?

Many of us post to Facebook, perhaps unaware of what can happen to that content and who has rights to it.  All of this came to a head a few days ago, as Facebook’s new terms of service (TOS) came to light and were met with a range of reactions from dismay to outrage.  

I’ve been reading Convergence Culture and being in Jane Jacob’s adopted home, I couldn’t help but think of how the social space of Facebook relates to how social interactions are shaped by governance and polity in online realms, as well as the idea of a commons that is a privatized space, as opposed to a public one.

While I’m resigned to the fact that there is no privacy online and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I hear that Facebook is being used by collections departments to locate unstealthy credit defaulters (true story), I do bristle at the idea of content being appropriated by companies hosting these web commons.

Why?  I’m using the private space of Facebook, why should I feel that what I post is still my intellectual property?  Am I being unreasonable?  After all, I push the boundaries of fair use quite a bit.

Can social network sites really be sites of democratic action, when they can ultimately be censored, not as a matter of public policy, but rather corporate TOS?  On the other side of the Web 2.0 fence, how much freedom should an organization grant users?

I feel that what any site engaging in Web 2.0 should do if they want to use content posted by users is…to simply ask them for permission.  It’s simple good manners and building of social capital.  I do think privatized social spaces or commons can be used for civic engagement, but I find emerging technologies being developed up here in Canada that allow content to be fed from multiple sites (e.g., MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) into one location to be rather interesting.  More on this in a future post.  I feel the overlap of Web 2.0 with open source will make us all rethink ownership and privacy and force organizations to ponder what intellectual property really means, what the risks are in terms of what the courts are stating, and how to implement processes.  Or not.  That devil inertia.

Image by Juliana Sohn / www.julianasohn.com

Courtney Martin in Utne Reader writes about Dennis Dalton, a political science professor at Barnard College who opens his class up to the residents of the Harlem neighborhood in which the school is located:

Many Harlemites have turned Dalton’s courses into a pilgrimage of sorts. Neighborhood residents have been attending his classes, some of them for more than 10 years. They never pay a fee or officially register; they simply slip in. Some are bibliophiles or retirees; others are body builders and taxi drivers. They range in age from 19 to “I’m not telling.

This article has me reeling. I spend my day as a social scientist trying to get people (mostly young people) to wrestle with social issues, to reflect on why they occur and to consider how we might address them. But we do these things within the confines of these tightly consigned boxes. New technology allows us to expand beyond these boxes to bring images and ideas to our students, but even then, their presentation is tightly controlled and structured.

We can bring students the reality of the world “out there” via service learning or study abroad, but the institution remains untouched. We send our students out to gain information about humanity and bring it back to spaces that we tightly control for the purposes of organized, structured learning. They and we are better off for the study abroad experience, but why should we stop there.  A real engagement with the world “out there” requires students to experience it where they live.  I think Martin is on to something when she says writes:

If Dalton’s lectures took place in a towering cathedral, they could be no more of a spiritual experience to the folks from Harlem. He gives them access to the inaccessible, an elite school that has, in its own posturing, presented itself as sacred but instead come off as segregationist. He adds structure to their lives, motivating them to make the trek up the hill every Tuesday and Thursday, come rain or shine. He sees them not as God’s children but as Plato’s philosopher kings. And they, in turn, give Dalton a gift that few academics will ever receive: a claim to authenticity.

There may be practical reasons for why universities don’t just let anyone enter their campuses to take courses (fear of lawsuit, monetary incentives). But as long as universities see themselves as distinct entities from the publics they serve, they will only partially fulfill their mission.  And I’ll have students looking at their watches when it’s five minutes ’till.